Regardless of whether you ended up enjoying the pop culture extravaganza that was Ready Player One, it’s hard to deny that the visual effects used to bring the digital world of The OASIS to life were quite the visual spectacle. It’s all thanks to the wizards at Industrial Light and Magic, and the special effects house has released a breakdown showing the layers of the animation we saw on the big screen. It’s rather mind-blowing, especially when it comes to The Shining sequence.

Ready Player One Visual Effects Breakdown

It’s truly incredible that Industrial Light and Magic was able to meticulously recreate The Overlook Hotel from The Shining from scratch. It’s not a real set, but if you were shown an image from the digital recreation of the hotel, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the real thing and the digital set.

Beyond that, the digital environments created for the movie are extremely immersive and detailed, even if they don’t look completely realistic. But there has to be a difference between the aesthetics of the real world and the digital world, so that makes sense. But there are elements of the digital world that look just as tangible as The Shining set, like the DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future.

Ready Player One was on the shortlist for Achievement in Visual Effects for the Academy Awards, so we’ll have to see if it ends up with an Oscar nomination when they’re announced early this year.